Righteousness

L ate last year Charles J. Sykes published an op-ed in theNew York Times called “Where the Right Went Wrong.” Sykes wrote that he was giving up his talk-radio show in Wisconsin after nearly 25 years: “My reasons are personal,” he said, but the rise of Donald Trump “has made my decision easier.” Not that the presidential campaign had lacked a certain personal angle for Sykes, a sharp Trump critic. “Conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show,” he wrote. On social media, “I found myself called a ‘cuckservative,’ a favorite gibe of white nationalists; and someone Photoshopped my face into a gas chamber.”

How the Right Lost Its Mind

The op-ed was a signal moment in the aftermath of Trump’s election. For years, Sykes had been a conservative stalwart, helping to make Wisconsin a wellspring of conservative thought and action. (He has also written for Commentary.) He had championed the political careers of conservative Republicans including Representative Paul Ryan, Governor Scott Walker, and Senator Ron Johnson, and he had backed conservative reforms such as reining in public-sector unions and widening school choice. Yet here he was in the Times, declaring: “The conservative media is broken and the conservative movement deeply compromised.” Conservatism’s “moral failure” in a time of ugly tribalism, he said, “lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph.”

The story of that moral failure demanded a fuller accounting than the spate of op-eds, columns, and articles produced by disillusioned conservatives following Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Now we have it with Sykes’s How the Right Lost Its Mind, a dissection of conservatism’s 2016 collapse but also a canny historical analysis. Sykes closes by suggesting how “contrarian conservatives” can work to restore the movement to sanity, but after reading this portrait of cynical acquiescence, collaboration, and opportunism, they would need a strong stomach to undertake such a mission.

Sykes’s father was a liberal activist in the 1960s, and Sykes, as a teenager, shared his father’s enthusiasm. The excesses of the anti-war era prompted his father to give up on the left, but Sykes joined the Young Democrats while in college in the 1970s. It wasn’t until he became a newspaper reporter covering urban issues that he realized that government programs beloved by liberals “seemed to exist for no other purpose than to satisfy a voter block and provide employment for various hacks and mediocrities. They did not discernably improve lives or fix any problems.”

In the late 1970s, Sykes began reading and appreciating conservative thinkers such as William F. Buckley Jr., Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz, but “most important for me was that conservative ideas simply made more sense; they took the world as it was rather than seeing it through the lens of wishful thinking and ideology.”

In the decades that followed, Sykes would become a conservative force, particularly on education matters (his books include Fail U: The False Promise of Higher Education, published last year). But then came Trump, supported by many conservatives who viewed him through the lens of wishful thinking and abandoned ideology.

“How did a movement that was defined by its belief in individual liberty, respect for the Constitution, free markets, personal responsibility, traditional values, and civility,” Sykes writes, “find itself embracing a stew of nativism, populism, and nationalism?”

The answer in part, he says, is that pre-Trump conservatism was actually “a mess—a contentious collection of disparate, often contradictory ideas and querulous warring factions of libertarians, chamber of commerce types, traditionalists, and social conservatives.” Yet this fractious coalition had held together, however unsteadily, since the ascendance of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Sykes describes in detail how the path for Reagan—and what now looks like the zenith of modern conservatism—had been prepared beginning in the mid-1950s with Buckley’s founding of National Review. Sykes recounts how Buckley routed from modern conservatism much of the “crackpotism” that then characterized the movement, epitomized by the fevered anti-Communist paranoia of the John Birch Society. (Decades later, Sykes notes, Buckley would perform a similar act of intellectual hygiene by calling out Patrick Buchanan’s anti-Semitism.) The publication of Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom in 1962 was another essential development, proposing a balancing of personal liberty and moral responsibility that came to be known as fusionism.

Sykes takes us through the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964—a failure at the ballot box, but a seminal moment in conservatism—and the 1970s rise of the New Right, which disdained modern conservatism’s intellectuals as elitist accomplices of the Republican establishment. At every stage of this story, Sykes notes the tumorous elements lurking in conservatism that would ultimately erupt in full-blown Trumpism. In 1976, he writes, the New Right edged toward supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace, a lightly reformed bigot, for the presidency, until “some of the calmer heads realized that would have meant an alliance with a coterie of crackpots, including anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. But the flirtation with Wallace served to expose a soft underbelly of conservatism.”

Ronald Reagan pulled together conservatives and Republicans and plenty of Democrats with buoyant themes of individual freedom and economic dynamism. Sykes wonders whether Reagan’s triumph would be possible today, given that it “paradoxically coincided with the relative absence of conservative media voices.” Rush Limbaugh didn’t go national until 1988; Fox News didn’t start up until 1996. “So for most of Reagan’s term, there was no conservative echo chamber,” Sykes writes, “no powerful talk radio, no Fox News or right-wing infrastructure providing air cover or enforcing ideological purity.” And there was no alt-right online army.

In a chapter called “Storm Warnings,” Sykes shows that Trump’s success hardly came out of the blue. In the Weekly Standard in 2005, conservative thinkers Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam published “The Party of Sam’s Club,” a “widely discussed but sadly ignored critique of conservatism” that warned about the GOP’s intellectual exhaustion, its cronyism and air of corruption. As Sykes notes, Douthat and Salam wrote that “the party isn’t just out of touch with the country as a whole, it’s out of touch with its own base.” Sykes also credits David Frum, who raised an alarm in 2008 about “tired and confused” Republican conservatism. Chronic overpromising and under-delivering would have disastrous consequences.

The advent of the Tea Party after Barack Obama’s election “seemed to open the door for the return of the sort of crackpots that Buckley had worked so hard to expel from the conservative movement,” Sykes writes. The book makes clear that as the Obama-era economic recovery limped along—and as the “perpetual outrage machine” of Tea Party political-action-committee fundraisers and their conservative-media soulmates worked overtime—the political scene was ripening for a candidate who could stoke resentments with a combination of freewheeling bellicosity, economic nostrums, and nationalistic pandering.

The list of Trump’s conservative enablers is rather long. At one end were the editorial writers and columnists who no doubt counted their mild, infrequent tsk-tsking about Trump’s excesses and policy incoherence as evidence of their principled conservatism rather than what it really was: camouflage for Trump-fueled dreams of a lower corporate tax rate and Obamacare’s demise. At the other end were Trump’s early advocates, a group that included media valets like Sean Hannity but was most grotesquely manifested by the racist, anti-Semitic trolls of the alt-right.

Sykes performs a public service by recording the exact wording of the vileness visited on Trump critics like writers David French and Bethany Mandel. There should be no illusions about the nature of the threats and insults, and no illusions about Trump’s reluctance to criticize the alt-right.

But at least right-wing bigots ran true to form, having simply found a more appealing and more accommodating candidate than they were used to. The jaw-dropping element in conservatism’s self-destruction was Trump’s support from the Christian right. In a chapter titled “What Happened to the Christians?” Sykes reviews the still-stunning transformation of evangelical leaders from proponents of moral character and personal responsibility to backers of a sexually harassing braggart and blame-shifting fabulist who knew vanishingly little about the Bible or its teachings. The Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy leader, Russell Moore, cut a lonely figure during the campaign by putting Christian principles before the temptation of political gain.

Drawing from exit-poll data, Sykes writes: “White evangelicals backed Trump by a staggering margin of 80 to 16 percent.” It was an extreme example of how the election boiled down to what he calls a “binary choice.” In the new politics, “choices are increasingly framed as us vs. them, red vs. blue, good vs. evil.” No matter how egregious Trump might have been, no matter how antithetical his views often were to basic conservative values (to the extent that he believes in anything other than the self-aggrandizement of Donald J. Trump), Hillary Clinton was always going to be worse, even though no one could quite figure out what she stood for.

Looking over the rubble of modern American politics, Sykes proposes that the left and right try to find common ground. “We could start with a renewed appreciation for a reality-based politics, truth, ethics, check and balances, civil liberties, and the constitutional limits on executive power.” He recommends an eight-step “conservative exorcism.” (“Break free from the toxic thrall of corporate cronyism”; “confront the conservative media that boosted and enabled Trumpism”; “revitalize a policy agenda that has grown tired and nostalgic.”) And he offers some advice for conservatives, including “Be worthy of the movement but make sure the movement is worthy of you,” “Opposing bad ideas is absolutely essential,” and: “Winning is great, but weigh the cost . . . After all, what profits it a man to win the whole world, if he loses his soul? But for an election? Any election?”

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Must-Reads from Magazine

Much hasbeenwritten here at COMMENTARY about Harvard’s ill-conceived war on “unrecognized single-gender organizations.” At issue are fraternities, sororities, and Harvard’s famously exclusive “finals clubs.” All of these groups already lack official status at Harvard, but starting with the class of 2021, Harvard promises to punish anyone who dares to join one. Such heretics “will not be permitted to hold leadership positions in recognized student organizations or on athletic teams.” They will also “not be eligible for letters of recommendation” from the Dean’s office for scholarships, including the prestigious Rhodes and Marshall, that require such a recommendation. In the name of inclusion, they must be excluded.

As Harvard explained, “the final clubs, in particular, are a product of another era, a time when Harvard’s student body was all male, culturally homogeneous, and overwhelmingly white and affluent.” Which is why—I wish I were kidding—sororities must be destroyed. On August 5th, Harvard’s chapter of Delta Gamma sorority announced that it would shut down. Wilma Johnson Wilbanks, president of Delta Gamma’s national organization, said that Harvard’s new policy “resulted in an environment in which Delta Gamma could not thrive.”

Harvard has gamely asserted that the sororities are part of the same ancient culture of privilege and exclusion as the finals clubs. And sororities play a minor role—the main villains are the “deeply misogynistic” all-male finals clubs—in the 2016 report on sexual assault at Harvard that launched the push for the new policy. But Harvard’s Delta Gamma chapter, founded in 1994, is an unintended casualty of a policy designed to crush all-male clubs. Harvard had initially planned to allow female-only clubs to remain “gender-focused” for five years after the new policy went into effect. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a critic of the new policy, pointed out, such special treatment probably would have violated Title IX, a civil rights law that governs campuses that receive federal funding.

The relevant section of Title IX reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title IX would seem to prevent Harvard from punishing men for belonging to all-male fraternities if it does not also punish women for belonging to all-female sororities.

Although one cannot prove that a lawyer whispered in Harvard’s ear, this Title IX problem may well explain why Harvard quietly dropped the five year grace period for sororities. But it might also explain why sororities were dragged into the new policy in the first place. If Harvard had gone to war solely with all-male clubs, its lawyers would have had the hard task of explaining why, under Title IX, a university can “decide that women’s groups can exist but men’s cannot.”

To win its war against misogyny, Harvard had to sacrifice sisterhood.

After all, Harvard’s justification for attacking single-sex organizations made liberal use of the term “diversity.” The university undoubtedly sympathized with the protesters who, reading out of the diversity playbook, insisted that all-women organizations are “safe spaces” for women. “Change is hard,” they said. What they meant was: “if we want to protect women we’ll need to take away their freedom of association.”

If you want to make a social justice omelet, you have to break some eggs.

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When President Donald Trump first floated the idea of creating an entirely new branch of the United States armed forces dedicated to space-based operations in March, the response from lay political observers was limited to bemused snickering. That mockery and amusement have not abated in the intervening months. Thursday’s announcement by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, that the administration plans to establish a sixth armed forces branch by 2020, occasioned only more displays of cynicism, but it shouldn’t have. This is deadly serious stuff. The expansion and consolidation of America’s capacities to defend its interests outside the atmosphere is inevitable and desirable.

Though you would not know it from those who spent the day chuckling to themselves over the prospect of an American space command, the militarization of this strategically vital region is decades old. Thousands of both civilian and military communications and navigations satellites operate in earth orbit, to say nothing of the occasional human. It’s impossible to say how many weapons are already stationed in orbit because many of these platforms are “dual use,” meaning that they could be transformed into kill vehicles at a moment’s notice.

American military planners have been preoccupied with the preservation of critical U.S. communications infrastructure in space since at least 2007, when China stunned observers by launching a missile that intercepted and destroyed a satellite, creating thousands of pieces of debris hurtling around the earth at speeds faster than any bullet.

America’s chief strategic competitors—Russia and China—and rogue actors like Iran and North Korea are all committed to developing the capability to target America’s command-and-control infrastructure, a lot of which is space-based. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified in 2017 that both Moscow and Beijing are “considering attacks against satellite systems as part of their future warfare doctrine” and are developing the requisite anti-satellite technology—despite their false public commitments to the “nonweaponization of space and ‘no first placement’ of weapons in space.”

Those who oppose the creation of a space branch object on a variety of grounds, some of them merit more attention than others. The contention that a sixth military branch is a redundant waste of taxpayer money, for example, is a more salient than cynical claims that Trump is interested only in a glory project.

“I oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions,” Sec. Mattis wrote in October of last year. That’s a perfectly sound argument against excessive bureaucratization and profligacy, but it is silent on the necessity of a space command. Both the Pentagon and the National Security Council are behind the creation of a “U.S. Space Command” in lieu of the congressional action required to establish a new branch of the armed forces dedicated to space-based operations.

As for bureaucratic sprawl, in 2015, the diffusion of space-related experts and capabilities across the armed services led the Air Force to create a single space advisor to coordinate those capabilities for the Defense Department. But that patch did not resolve the problems and, in 2017, Congress’s General Accountability Office recommended investigating the creation of a single branch dedicated to space for the purposes of consolidation.

It is true that the existing branches maintain capabilities that extend into space, which would superficially make a Space Force seem redundant. But American air power was once the province of the U.S. Army and Navy, and bureaucratic elements within these two branches opposed the creation of a U.S. Air Force in 1947. The importance of air power in World War II and the likelihood that aircraft would be a critical feature of future warfighting convinced policymakers that a unified command of operations was critical to effective warfighting. Moreover, both Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman believed that creating a separate branch for airpower ensured that Congress would be less likely to underfund the vital enterprise.

The final argument against the militarization of space is a rehash of themes from the Cold War. Low earth orbit, like the seafloor and the Antarctic, is part of the “global commons,” and should not be militarized on principle. This was the Soviet position, and Moscow’s fellow travelers in the West regularly echoed it. But the argument is simply not compelling.

The Soviets insisted that the militarization of space was provocative and undesirable, but mostly because they lacked the capability to weaponize space. The Soviets regularly argued that any technology it could not match was a first-strike weapon. That’s why they argued vigorously against deploying missile interceptors but voiced fewer objections to ground-based laser technology. As for the “global commons,” that’s just what we call the places where humans do not operate for extended periods of time and where resource extraction is cost prohibitive. The more viable the exploration of these hostile environments becomes, the less “common” we will eventually consider them.

Just as navies police sea lanes, the inevitable commercialization of space ensures that its militarization will follow. That isn’t something to fear or lament. It’s not only unavoidable; it’s a civilizational advance. Space Force may not be an idea whose time has come, but deterrence is based on supremacy and supremacy is the product of proactivity. God forbid there comes a day on which we need an integrated response to a state actor with capabilities in space, we will be glad that we didn’t wait for the crisis before resolving to do what is necessary.

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Chicken Little has always been the press secretary of the environmental movement.

In the 1960’s there was good reason to think the sky was actually falling. The New Yorker published a cartoon showing a wife standing by a table set for lunch in the backyard of a brownstone. “Hurry darling,” she calls to her husband, “Your soup’s getting dirty.” In 1969, the Cuyahoga River that runs through Cleveland was so polluted that it caught fire, not for the first time.

But in 1970, Earth Day was established. It was one of the most remarkable examples of grassroots activism in American history, involving fully 10 percent of the population. Late that year, Congress, at the behest of the Nixon Administration, established the Environmental Protection Agency. A series of acts requiring pollution controls and abatement followed, and the great American clean up began.

How has it worked out? As Investor’s Business Dailyreports, the clean up has been a howling success. From 1990 to 2017, the six major air pollutants monitored by the EPA plunged by 73 percent from levels that were already well below 1970 levels. By comparison, during that time, the U.S. economy grew 262 percent and its population expanded by 60 percent. And by 1990, much progress had already been made. Banning lead in gasoline, where it was used as an antiknock agent, beginning in the 1980’s had already greatly reduced the level of atmospheric lead, reducing, in turn, the level found in blood. It is down 98 percent from 1980.

Water pollution has plunged as well, as sewage treatment plants came online. In 1970, Manhattan discharged the sewage of 1.5 million people into the surrounding waterways. Today, there is an annual swimming race around Manhattan. There is even talk of a beach for Manhattan Island, the only borough of New York City without one. This sort of improvement has been duplicated across the country. The Connecticut River, once a 400-mile sewer, is now safe for fishing and swimming along its entire length. Even the Cuyahoga is in much better shape, with riverside cafés looking out over blue water instead of rafts of sludge.

And yet this good news can be hard to find. Government agencies usually are not shy about tooting their own horns when they have success to report. But the pollution history on the EPA’s website is hard to find. And the websites of such organizations as the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, are still in full the-sky-is-falling mode. I suspect the reason for that has more to do with fundraising strategy than the actual state of the environment.

And even that bugbear of the environmentalist movement, the country’s output of CO2, has fallen 29 percent since it peaked in 2007. That’s thanks largely to the switchover from coal to natural gas as fracking has greatly increased the supply and, thus, lowered the price. Trumpeting that statistic, of course, would not advance the cause of what used to be called “global warming,” and is now called “climate change.”

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We decided to do our version of The Handmaid’s Tale and try to imagine the world in 2019 from two perspectives: One in which Democrats fail to win the House of Representatives in November and the other in which Democrats win handily. What will they do in each case? What will Republicans do? Give a listen.

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In November 1995, COMMENTARY published a symposium called “The National Prospect” in which dozens of writers offered their view of America’s possible future. I just went and looked at my entry in that symposium, which I had not thought of in years, because of Laura Ingraham’s statement on TV last night that “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like … this is related to both illegal and legal immigration.”

What my symposium entry indicates is that views like hers have been percolating on the Right for decades. I thought you might find it interesting to read:

***

“This is not the country my father fought for,” a one-time colleague who grew up as an Army brat was telling me over lunch five years ago. He sang a threnody of national faults, and I could only hang my head in mute agreement—crime, multiculturalism, educational collapse, everything conservatives have worried over and fought against for twenty years or more.

He grew more and more excited. From multiculturalism, he began talking about the threat posed by immigrants, and from that threat to the threat posed by native-born blacks. As he was taken over by his passion and imagined me an ally in it, he began dropping words into his monologue that in his calmer moments he never would have used with me, words like “nigger” and “wetback” I had heard used only in rages and then only maybe twice before outside of a movie or TV show. And then, forgetting himself entirely, he allowed as how Jews were blocking the true story of our national decline.

It is not only inconvenient to hear words you might have spoken coming out of the mouth of a racist, nativist anti-Semite. It is also a reminder that ideas you hold dear may be used as weapons in a war you never intended to fight—a war in which those weapons may be turned against you just as my one-time colleague turned his assault on multiculturalism into an assault on Jews.

This is my warning as we consider the national prospect. Those who believe America is in a period of cultural decline are obviously correct; I am not at all sure how anyone of good will could argue otherwise.

And yet, and yet, and yet. It is one thing to worry over and battle against the dumbing-down of our schools; the assault on taste, standards, and truth posed by multiculturalism; the rise of repellent sexual egalitarianism; even the dangers of advanced consumerism are becoming increasingly worrisome.

But it is quite another thing to make the leap from that point to the notion that the nation itself is in parlous and irreversible decline. After all, nations are always in parlous moral health; nations are gatherings of people, and people are sinners. When the United States was putatively healthier, back in the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s, 12 percent of its population was living in de-facto or de-jure immiseration and the Wasp majority protected its position in the elite by means of explicit quotas and exclusions.

The declinists are both wrong and spiritually noxious. After all, the purpose of declaring the nation in decline is to root out the causes of the decline, extirpate them, and put the nation on the road to health. But, for some of them, the search for causes always leads to blacks, immigrants, and Jews. In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Harvard’s own Quentin Compson finds himself suicidal over America’s conversion into the “land of the kike home of the wop.”

Blacks and Jews are ever the inevitable, juicy target—so inevitable that they still find a link in the fevered minds of the paleo-Right, even though all blacks and Jews have in common now is the way the paleo-Right links them.

What blacks, Jews, and immigrants always seem to lack in the eyes of declinists is some version of the American character—that which my one-time colleague believed his father to have fought for. The dark underbelly of the American political experiment is the very idea of an American character itself. It is, fundamentally, an un-American idea. It is the nature of America that there is no one American character. Demography is not destiny in America as it is everywhere else; where you come from is not who you are.

I can find no quarrel with the brief of particulars offered by the declinists. But their central idea gives heart and strength to people whose threnodies can sound like the song of the siren—and must, like the siren’s song, be resisted by all strong men.

–Nov. 1, 1995

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